PayPal owned payments company TIO admits hack

A PayPal owned company called TIO has admitted to a hack that means user data has been made vulnerable and that could well include payment details.

PayPal paid $233m USD for the Canadian payments firm in February this year. And they have admitted that they have “identified a potential compromise of personally identifiable information for approximately 1.6 million customers.” The TIO purchase concluded in July 2017 and apparently since then PayPal has been reviewing TIO’s services and that investigation has revealed the hack. The TIO service was suspended on November 10th and there is no indication of when it might be reinstated.

Only TIO users have been impacted, this data breach has not affected users of any other PayPal service or PayPal itself.

The published TIO statement says that they have: “uncovered evidence of unauthorized access to TIO’s network, including locations that stored personal information of some of TIO’s customers and customers of TIO billers.”

“We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused to you by the disruption of TIO’s service. We will continue to communicate important updates to customers,”

In the meantime The company has advised users to find alternative ways to pay their bills and also Offered customers free credit checks and identity theft insurance as part of their reaction to the problem.

This sounds like a fairly serious data breach and any such hack is all the more worrying when it happens to be a payments firms that’s affected. And that is why reading over the FAQs and statement is particularly depressing. It’s perfunctory and unilluminating an, therefore, not particularly reassuring. And, according to reports, the company hasn’t yet even contacted all customers.